Cousteau family row may sink his ark

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Thursday July 31 2003

In editing this report we may have given the impression that the Loel Guinness who bought the boat 50 years ago was one with the present Loel Guinness, "a reclusive member of the Anglo-Irish brewing family". In fact, it was the latter's grandfather who bought it.

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For 40 years it was the mythical flagship of that most emblematic - and heavily-accented - of Frenchmen, the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau. Under his command it sailed the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Antarctic, the Nile, the Amazon, and the Yangtze, revealing their murky secrets to captivated television viewers around the world.

Now the Calypso, its superstructure riddled with rust and its timbers rotten, languishes unrecognised and all but unrecognisable in the dock of La Rochelle's maritime museum, as a legal wrangle threatens to send it to the place where the great Commander made his name: the bottom of the ocean.

"The whole affair disgusts me," said Patrick Schnepp, the museum's director, who for five years has been hoping to turn the vessel into the centrepiece of a permanent exhibition.

The craft was built in the US from Oregon pine, and spent the first part of its life as a British minesweeper.

"Everything that's not broken is rotten, and everything that's not rotten is broken," he said.

Mr Schnepp would like to see the Calypso taken to a suitable spot off the nearby Ile de Ré and scuttled: the fate that Cousteau, who died in 1997, apparently envisaged for the ship he first fell in love with in 1950. Assuming it makes it that far - which in its present state is by no means certain - the vessel would meet a fitting end as a place of pilgrimage for scuba divers.

But that is not what Francine, Cousteau's second wife, wants for the Calypso. As his sole heir, she owns the potentially lucrative "image rights" to the vessel, and says she wants it restored.

She does not, however, own the Calypso itself. It belongs to a company owned by Loel Guinness, a reclusive member of the Anglo-Irish brewing family. Mr Guinness and Francine, to put it mildly, do not see eye-to-eye.

Mr Guinness bought the ship 50 years ago when it was doing service as a Maltese ferry, and leased it to Cousteau for a symbolic one franc a year. As soon as he saw the 43-metre Calypso, Cousteau fell for its robustness and manoeuvrability, stuffed it full of the most up-to-date technology, and in 1957 won an Oscar with it for his ground breaking film The Silent World.

For generations of subsequent viewers of Cousteau's television series, the ship's name was synonymous with that of its master - until 1996, when it sank in Singapore harbour. Already badly damaged, the Calypso was raised with the help of £600,000 of insurance money and shipped to Marseille, where it lay neglected for two years before being floated in a dry dock to La Rochelle.

"At that stage, it was still just about saveable," said Mr Schnepp. "Francine convinced the then mayor of La Rochelle to put up money for the restoration, but then we discovered the ownership problem, and shortly after the mayor died. Since then, nothing has been done. Nothing."

Last year Cousteau's granddaughter by his first marriage, Alexandra, took up the fight.

"We set up a Calypso Foundation, with Guinness's agreement," says Francois Dorado, a French diver who is, with other former members of Cousteau's crew, backing Alexandra. "He was going to put up some money, La Rochelle town council would put up more, and the foundation would raise the rest. We all love this ship; we weep to see the state it's in. But Guinness backed out... we're back to where we started."

As the lawyers' letters wing to and fro and the expenses mount, the Calypso continues to rot. Francine Cousteau, who could not be contacted last week, recently set up a rival foundation, Arionis, to raise funds for repairs, and in the meantime has insisted that the ship's name be removed from the hull and superstructure, according to Mr Schnepp.

But he, for one, has given up hope. "I wash my hands of the whole business," he said. "It's a cross between Dynasty and The Onedin Line.

"In any case, it's too late now. If we try to move it, it'll break into a thousand pieces."

About this article

Cousteau family row may sink his ark

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 04.31 EDT on Monday 28 July 2003.
It was last modified at 04.31 EDT on Thursday 31 July 2003.
It was first published at 04.31 EDT on Thursday 31 July 2003.